The Flower of the Chapdelaines eBook

But Ovide smilingly restored the thing to its stack.
“Now,” he said, “’tis Mr.
Chester’s logic that fails.” Yet
as he turned to a customer he let Chester take it
down.

“My job requires me,” the youth said,
“to study character. Let’s see what
a grand’mere of a ’tite-fille,
situated so and so, will do.”

Ovide escorted his momentary customer to the sidewalk
door. As he returned, Chester, rolling map and
magazine together, said:

“It’s getting dark. No, don’t
make a light, it’s your closing time and I’ve
a strict engagement. Here’s a deposit for
this magazine; a fifty. It’s all I have—­oh,
yes, take it, we’ll trade back to-morrow.
You must keep your own rules and I must read this
thing before I touch my bed.”

“It may be that the writer preferred to tell
it as fiction, and that only something in me told
me ’tis true. Something still tells me
so.”

“‘Now, Maud,’” Chester
smilingly thought to himself when, the evening’s
later engagement being gratifyingly fulfilled, he sat
down with the story. “And so you were
grand’mere to our Royal Street miracle.
And you had a Southern uncle! So had I! though
yours was a planter, mine a lawyer, and yours must
have been fifty years the older. Well, ’Now,
Maud,’ for my absorption!”

It came. Though the tale was unamazing amazement
came. The four chief characters were no sooner
set in motion than Chester dropped the pamphlet to
his knee, agape in recollection of a most droll fact
a year or two old, which now all at once and for the
first time arrested his attention. He also had
a manuscript! That lawyer uncle of his, saying
as he spared him a few duplicate volumes from his
law library, “Burn that if you don’t want
it,” had tossed him a fat document indorsed:
“Memorandum of an Early Experience.”
Later the nephew had glanced it over, but, like “Maud’s”
story, its first few lines had annoyed his critical
sense and he had never read it carefully. The
amazing point was that “Now, Maud”
and this “Memorandum” most incredibly—­with
a ridiculous nicety—­fitted each other.

He lifted the magazine again and, beginning at the
beginning a third time, read with a scrutiny of every
line as though he studied a witness’s deposition.
And this was what he read:

IV

THE CLOCK IN THE SKY

“Now, Maud,” said uncle jovially as he,
aunt, and I drove into the confines of their beautiful
place one spring afternoon of 1860, “don’t
forget that to be too near a thing is as bad for a
good view of it as to be too far away.”